Chicago’s New Museum to the Vain and Glorious

Lots of good art at the Obama Presidential Center, but does its museum cross an IRS line?

T omorrow the Obama Presidential Center officially opens. Last week I wrote about the architecture of the museum and proselytizing building, which overall I liked, at the new center. Today, I’ll go from outside to inside. The art is very good and the production values are top-notch. The content? If I had a nickel for every false value, every ray of gas light, every guilt-trip moment, I’d be a multimillionaire.

The Obamas wanted a substantial, distinguished public-art component and got it. Mount Vernon and Monticello notwithstanding, the art bar at presidential sites has been low. How low can you go? Rhinestone campaign pins and Air Force One count as art. The Obama Center changes that for the better. I’ll start with Julie Mehretu’s 83-by-25 foot painted-glass window on the north façade that runs up the wall of the first few floors by the nicest escalators I’ve ever seen. It’s indoor/outdoor art in that it’s scrutable from the outside. The kind of granite is known as Tapestry because of its intricate patterns, like stone brocade, so Mehretu’s window works well with it. The title, Uprising of the Sun, makes me chuckle, given Obama’s pledge to lower the oceans and heal the planet. So he makes the sun uprise, too?

The window isn’t really stained glass — there, color is added as part of the blowing process — but painted glass. It’s fantastic. Mehretu, a very good artist, hadn’t used glass as a surface before. We can see color from outside. It looks like a Sol LeWitt wall drawing. Inside, we mostly experience it in transit as we move up the escalators. It’s a palette cleanser.

Martin Puryear’s Bending the Arc started with a 34-foot wood beam, scanned, enlarged digitally, and then cast in stainless steel. It’s inspired by Martin Luther King, who said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It’s a straightforward studio piece from the 85-year-old artist who, at this point, is mailing it in.

I like nearly everything Mark Bradford does, and that includes his 38-foot-tall collage City of the Big Shoulders, a tribute to Chicago’s South Side titled after a line in Carl Sandberg’s 1914 poem “Chicago.” Before the Windy City came along, and Chicago is no windier than lots of places, it was known as the City of the Big Shoulders, America’s butcher, tool maker, and wheat stacker, defiantly “building, breaking, rebuilding.” Bradford starts with a map, making it with vibrant paint color but also caulk, rope, and slices of billboards. I love Norman Teague’s walnut benches, chocolate-colored, with slashing forms and backs that actually make for comfortable seating. A museum with good seating rises in my esteem.

Jack Pierson’s wall sculpture  — spelling HOPE with old, mismatched letters from business signs — has a prominent place right by the entrance and seems trite. Of course, the O is by far the biggest letter. Without O for Obama, we’re hopeless, I guess. Pierson’s a good artist from the 1980s Boston School along with Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, and the Starn twins. He does a lot of corporate work, which I’m not dissing, but his letter wall sculpture could just as easily spell Cracker Barrel or Coke Classic.

Thirty artists — nearly all big names such as Jenny Holzer, Nick Cave, and Marie Watt — made commissioned work for the center. The guiding light isn’t art for art’s sake. It’s art about Obama’s themes. There’s nothing I hated, though some of the art is modest, and one piece is a flop. Truly awful, and scary-awful, is the bigger-than-life bronze sculpture outside the museum depicting the Obamas walking hand in hand in the parade following his 2009 inauguration. It’s designed by the art foundry Studio EIS in Brooklyn and based on the very nice photograph of the Obamas, he smiling and in earnest, excited triumph, not a bad look, and she in a gorgeous lemongrass Isabel Toledo dress and coat. The bronze loses the color, an optimistic, shimmering shade between gold and yellow, presents their nice teeth as, well, bronze, and kills their youth and energy.

I think we’re getting a preview of President Trump’s heroes sculpture garden times 250, the number to be honored. Frederic Remington, Paul Manship, Daniel Chester French, and St. Gaudens were masters in bronze realism. It’s not easy. The aesthetic doesn’t come naturally anymore. To make a portrait sculpture where the subject doesn’t look embalmed takes Victorian panache.

What I didn’t see in the center’s art program was a breakout stunner by a young, little-known artist. I love work like that, the art version of “Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster, but you have to come back a star.” That’s 42nd Street and New York, I know, but Chicago is about women murderers. Instead, we get blue-chip names. Giving a few up-and-coming stars a break would be a big deal. Museums should buy their work rather than high-priced work by established artists. I hope that in a year the center’s masters will refresh the art.

Going through the museum, I experienced a woke megaphone and a degree of adulation and self-regard that ought to make all but the starstruck queasy. It’s relentless in advocating a hard-left, though sugar-coated, program and his version of his and Michelle’s journey, and I heard the pop word “journey” a hundred times. So Marco Polo. I have to hand it to them. The museum is full-blown and has depth and breadth, no fluff, all political muscle.

In the first gallery, it was funny and sad to see a dimly lit case displaying a copy of the Declaration of Independence, so dim that no one could read it without a flashlight. “Don’t look too closely” seems to be the message. Left-wingers don’t want we plebes to get too independent, putting them out of business. Obama’s ideological roots are identified in posters and banners promoting affirmative action, withdrawal from Iraq, an end to South African apartheid, the unilateral-disarmament group Teachers for Peace, which I suspect was a fifth column and a front group, anti-slavery, farm workers’ rights, and women’s rights. There’s his exotic, murky background — “I was from everywhere and nowhere at once,” reads a headline quote from Obama — and Michelle’s more prosaic one. She’s a whiner. How many times must her formidable, impressive mother have told her to “quit whinin’, girl” and show some gratitude?

There are spots where pop hits from the 1970s and ’80s play. Tunes including “I’ll Be There,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Aretha’s “RESPECT,” and disco standards help set a mood. Music videos with dancing ASL interpreters were a fun touch, as were, unintentionally, wall panels like A Bright Idea — No Fossil Fuels. The center’s energy comes from sustainable sources, which means it has money to burn. Land acknowledgments always make me laugh, but the Obama Center bombs us with Hamas-speak about our role as settler-colonialist baddies, which isn’t funny.

The Obamas didn’t want a time capsule or a place that looked at them apart from their times or our times today. Leaving office in his mid-50s, he was too young and too political to walk away from his issues. After leaving office, Gerald Ford seemed to never not be playing golf. The center took no direct federal money, but infrastructure changes such as relocating roads and utilities and rebuilding the park drainage system cost about $140 million in city and state money, much reimbursed by the feds. The road to the center’s grand opening was painful, with many lawsuits seeking to stop it. Alas, no court in Illinois will rule against the Obamas.

The 1980s — the Reagan era — get a dig. “Instead of pursuing social justice, we were told to make money,” Obama said. What follows? Head of the Harvard Law Review — he’s among the handful of Harvard Law Review heads who never actually wrote an article, though the center doesn’t mention this. Then community organizing, a stint as a do-nothing state legislator — oops, that’s my voice, not the museum’s — his 2004 Democratic National Committee speech, the 2008 campaign and “Yes We Can,” then on to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The graphics are great, the cases are satisfyingly anonymous, and the storyline is well balanced between crisp labels, artifacts, and compelling photographs. Getting that balance in a history museum is a feat.

Over four floors of galleries, the museum follows a timeline of what Obama considers his top moments. The economic stimulus, an Afghanistan surge I’d forgotten, Dodd-Frank, DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — Obamacare, of course, the Paris Climate Accord, legalization of gay marriage in all 50 states, the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy, “girl power” initiatives, and the Iran nuke deal get a close look. The Libya fiasco, Fast and Furious, the thug Lois Lerner’s IRS scumbaggery, Solyndra, siring the Russia Hoax, the “if you like your health insurance, you can keep it” lie, and the $400 million cash bribe to the gangster Iranian mullahs? Nary a peep. I didn’t know that his disgusting, incendiary comments after the Trayvon Martin killing — “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” — led to the My Brother’s Keeper initiative or that there was such a thing.

One floor is on life in the White House. It’s nice. Michelle Obama showed her best side as a good hostess and was on her best behavior as a mentor and positive role model. She isn’t always an insecure, angry, race-obsessed woman. Her fight against obesity was certainly needed. Fat children are everywhere now, and it’s terrible. A duplication of Obama’s Oval Office is very beige and rust, and the paintings are hung too high, a crime against art. It has the look of a high-end hotel business center, but all versions of the Oval Office have been bleak, even sterile. At least Trump’s has pizzazz, though I’d ditch the random, isolated, gilded garland and flourish. These are fine but have to be part of something like a picture frame or a pilaster. There’s a gallery for Michelle’s dresses. She’s got good taste. She’s far closer to Jackie than, say, to Bess Truman.

The fifth floor is the space for recruitment and advocacy. It feeds us insidious DEI ideology, the climate hoax, globalism, and the typical Davos pat-myself-on-the-back fare, but it’s wily and meant to enrich its proponents. It’s schizophrenic, since Occupy Wall Street and killing pipelines get five stars, but one was performance art, and the other is a chef’s kiss to China, which doesn’t want us to be energy-independent. One of the speakers at the press preview was Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s fixer-in-chief. Every president needs one, and I don’t fault her. She’s the head of the Obama Center. I admire her for the heroic job in pulling off a massive project that, whether or not you like the looks and themes of it, is very high-quality.

The overall theme of the center’s programs is “when ordinary people come together to do something extraordinary.” That’s one facet of democracy and citizenship in action, and it’s essential, since most people are apathetic and believe that you can’t fight City Hall — but, having done so and won, my mantra is “yes we can,” in a good way. Jarrett and her team itemized what the Obama think tank will do. There’s a program to train young, can-do, local leaders, and a public-service degree program with the University of Chicago that’s surely going to be filled with more hot air than a fleet of zeppelins.

A degree in public service is a waste of money and of synthetic sheepskin. As with the Kennedy School and library, ambitious young men and women will see the Obama Center from afar and think, Yes, I can one day be president and lower the ocean level, cool the planet, heal the lame, raise the dead, and achieve that perfectly puffed soufflé.

There’s a K–12 program in civic education that promises to be nonpartisan but aims to produce “values-based citizens,” but let’s call something that’s shovel-ready “shovel-ready.” Free-market, pro-life, and all bitter-clinger impulses will get slathered with ideological flame retardant. There’s also a section devoted to creatures named after Obama. Weird, I thought, and all are, funnily and appropriately enough, swamp creatures, except for the little Nystalus obamai, a puff bird from South America.

The Obama Center also has a community center, public library, sports center, and a parking garage, totaling 455,000 square feet on 19 acres. It’s YUGE. Let’s face it, too, it’s a temple and a left-wing advocacy machine. At least the Obama Center doesn’t have Air Force One, which, to me, counts as an amusement-park feature whose space and expenses ought to be taxed. Still, it’s overkill. I’ve been following the ceremonial lead-up to the formal opening all week and thought about the glorious, overwrought arrival of Cleopatra — played by Elizabeth Taylor — in the 1963 movie. The museum’s all about self-aggrandizement and, after thinking about it, I have to say that it has next to no educational value. The IRS should yank its tax-exempt status and let the courts rule.